Bartending Confidential

What the other guys won't tell you

Photo Credit: Armen

Bartender is an enigmatic job. Both revered and looked down upon. For every middle-aged guy who fantasizes about quitting his insurance job and living the good life slinging drinks in South Beach, there’s a Saudi guy treating you as a subhuman.

I’ve been bartending part time for years, and I’ve seen the ups and downs of the job, so as I move on to another chapter in my professional life, I thought it would be an opportune time to give everyone the real skinny on being a bartender.

First and foremost, it’s not as glamorous as many people think. It’s far superior to digging ditches or driving a bus, but it’s also hard work, usually involving washing dishes and taking out the trash and a lot of other stuff. You’re only seeing the easy part.

The characters Billy Joel was singing about who wished to reclaim their lives by rejecting responsibility probably couldn’t have done it. Those guys are yahoos who think the whole job is hitting on chicks and doing shots. Not to say that doesn’t exist, but you’d have to either own the bar or be related to or having sex with whoever does to get away with that for very long, otherwise you would be fired.

It requires being on your feet for eight hours and a lot of carpel-tunnel inducing repetitive movements. At the same time, you have to be mentally focused or at least deft enough to cover up your mistakes without the in-house camera, which is always trained on you, catching whatever you’re doing.

I’ll admit, when I got my first bartending job, with a resumé that made it look like I’d won a James Beard Award and opened several martini bars in Upper Manhattan, I didn’t know how to make a whiskey sour or a boilermaker (which is a beer and a shot of whiskey.)

Realizing I was in over my head, my solution was to kiss the asses of all of my co-workers so they’d vouch for me if management enquired, and to make incredibly sharp, deliberate movements when anyone was looking, hoping to give the illusion of being busy while I tried to wrap my head around what I was supposed to be doing.

It is harder than it looks. Making ten drinks at once isn’t all too challenging. Making them while twenty drunk people are yelling at you is harder, like playing Jeopardy in your living room versus onstage.

The physicality combined with the mental organization required, in the midst of sensory overload no less, disqualifies about half the population who lack one or the other capability, I’d assume.

Within a week I was competent, and within a month I was pretty good at it. By that I mean I could handle a big crowd smoothly. That’s a myth bartenders feed you. It’s not all that difficult once you get it down. You don’t have to know a thousand recipes or how to make an obscure cocktail that only an uncultured snob would order, such as a bijou or an aviation.

Almost all drinks have two or three or four ingredients. Usually, a liquor and often a liqueur such as triple sec and some kind of juice or sugar. What do you do if you don’t know how to make something? Ask a co-worker who’s been bartending since the wall came down, look it up on your phone, or, best of all, ask the person who ordered it.

The only reason anyone does this is they want to feel sophisticated, so they enjoy nothing more than telling you how to do it.

You also need to have a certain attitude. This would be anywhere between ingratiating, assertive, and just being a total asshole, depending on what kind of bar you’re working in.

For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to keep it right down the middle. Not the lobby bar at the Ritz, and not a hole-in-the-wall dive that encourages graffiti in the bathroom and regularly makes the news for another stabbing.

I’m taking about bars where people of all ages tend to congregate to watch sports or celebrate the end of the work week, beachy bars or those with antlers on the wall, salt-blasted regulars and sorority girls, small-time drug dealers and old guys who come in at the same time every day and read a physical newspaper.

These places usually have an animal in the name of the place, Sharkey’s, The Red Fox, Squirrels, The Surly Goat, The Ugly Tuna Saloona (I’ve been to all of those places except the last one, that’s where a guy named Brian Shaffer walked in and never walked back out, despite ample security camera footage, interesting story.)

Before being a bartender I’d sometimes worked as a waiter, and what made me fairly infuriating as a server actually translated to me being a pretty good bartender.

As a waiter you’re supposed to pretend you like people and smile at them. Why anyone would care what their waiter thinks of them, as long as he brings the food out, was always beyond me. How insecure are these people? You want a fake friend to bend the knee and wait at your beck and call, there are escort services in every major city, I cannot make you not hate your spouse.

My thinking was, I don’t care about you, tell me what you want to eat, and I’ll bring it. This is the dynamic we agreed upon, is it not? This garnered a lot of complaints.

But as a bartender most of your job is churning out as much product as possible, especially if it’s busy. You don’t need to smile at people. Even better, when people are wasted and irritating you, you’re actually encouraged to be a prick. Even if you say something totally out of line to a customer, such as, “You asked me six times, we stopped serving already… twat,” nobody will ever believe the drunk person.

And you need to be firm with drunkards. You cannot be too empathetic or even dignify them, they will zero in on it immediately. It’s no different than dealing with children. You need to put them in their place. I would do this by walking away from them and letting them decide how they wanted to behave from this point forward. I don’t have any kind of a power trip. But the fact is that I had what they needed, and if they were being disrespectful, they were out of luck.

As a waiter you are forced to talk to your guests. As a bartender you can talk to whoever you select or choose to talk to nobody. They are forced to approach you, not the other way around.

There are occupational hazards. Just like athletes, the wear and tear takes a toll eventually.

I noticed at my last job that when I walked in and said “hello,” to my co-workers, they would bellow “HELLO” back as though the room were full, yet it was two in the afternoon with one customer and the place was no louder than a Target.

After a decade or more on the job with music blasting and people screaming at them over the top of it, they were all going deaf, and there were other factors. Too many of them smoked as part of the culture.

My personal relationship suffered, never having a Friday or Saturday night open and being exhausted on Sunday. Did I ever complain that she worked all day, no, but there’s a certain standard most of society adheres to, and even though I worked harder, I was the bum.

The overwhelming majority of these jobs are non-union. You show up and work, you get paid, and you get paid pretty well. A bartender at a popular spot where the crowd waiting to order is three deep all night is taking home at least four hundred bucks in cash.

Among the trade-offs, you get hurt, you need a vacation, you need time off because your dog is sick, whatever it is, you don’t get paid.

But the major sticking point is that you really have to work your ass off, or you’ll be fired. I don’t care if you’ve bartended at the same spot for five or ten years, if you start slipping up, you’ll be canned, and they’ll fabricate an excuse as to why. This is The Jungle.

The mental toll can be draining. I don’t know who works as hard as bartenders. Probably people in the emergency room. Roofers. NFL linebackers on the cusp. But sure as hell not lawyers or CEOs.

When I say work your ass off, I don’t mean it in the way people mean it when they’re studying to get a nursing degree.

I mean that on a minute to minute, and second to second basis, you are moving, you are making two drinks while you take two orders, you are sweating, you are bounding from place to place, reaching up, reaching down, while at the same time expending mental energy, listening to some idiot, and there are a lot of them, who waited ten minutes for a drink and suddenly can’t tell you what he wants, while fifty eyes are glaring at you, and another fifty people are shouting at you, unable to comprehend that they are not singularly deserving of your attention.

You’re literally working for every dollar you make.

I went to one of those progressive restaurants recently where they don’t accept tips because they pay the workers a decent wage. How un-American. These were some of the slowest, most nonchalant, high life-expectation having motherfuckers I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean this as an indictment on socialism or unions, but you will rarely see someone working as hard as a busy bartender, because the harder they work, by the easily quantifiable numbers, the more money they make. It’s effort out, cash in at the end of every night.

A common question I’d get when telling someone I bartend was, “You must meet a lot of girls.”

This was never a motivating factor for me, but no. Bartending is a blue-collar job. I’m in my early forties. I guarantee I would meet many more randy ladies if I was a hundred pounds heavier and worked for Charles Schwab. It’s not like being in a cover band.

I also get done cleaning the place at about 3 or 4 am. At that point I’m incredibly hangry and need to rub my feet for fifteen minutes while I decompress from whatever soul-sucking scenario I experienced earlier in the evening while eating a leftover pizza I boxed up that was barely touched by whoever ordered it.

I don’t really like eating a stranger’s leftover food, but what place is open? Should I get home and prepare a risotto, at four am? Piss off.

I’ll get back to the soul-sucking scenarios later, and yes, obviously bartenders meet people while bartending, but I think it’s a lot less often than you’d think, usually patrons are just screaming unintelligible things at whoever is getting them wasted.

Until recently I never understood why any bar looking to make money would hire a male bartender, even if it was a super hot guy like Nomar Garciaparra.

If you go into a bar, say a smaller bar where there is only one bartender, and it’s an attractive woman, there will be twelve losers in there drinking, who have built up in their minds over the last fifteen months the belief that they have a shot with her.

It would seem like a very simple business calculation to only hire a certain type of woman in terms of physical appearance to bartend.

The issue lies in the fact that women are extremely jealous of each other, and without a male presence to create an equilibrium the business will devolve into frequent after-hours hair pulling incidents because someone is stealing someone else’s tips and flirting with someone else’s part-time boyfriend from behind the bar.

There needs to be a coed demo. Most people have no idea what it means to listen to three women argue with each other, at four in the morning, and you can’t go home until they’ve added up their receipts. You are being held hostage by a gaggle of drunk girls. Someone needs to put their foot down and yell, “I think I have testicular cancer, I need to go home, can you stop it! Let’s finish up! Now!”

Then you have to apologize about the cancer lie the next day but you were the least inappropriate person in the whole scenario by far so it’s all good.

Not to mention, women who seek out jobs based on their physical appearance are typically extremely entitled and horrible at whatever they’re doing. They’ll stand around chatting while other people work, so you need a few guys around to pick up the slack. They’ll also get bored and shack up with some guy six months later once they realize the job entails taking out the trash and washing dishes, so it’s barely worth the constant headache and turnover.

Along those lines, I’m sorry to say, it really bothers me when these types of female bartenders, meaning the unexperienced model type, complain about guys being pervy with them. That’s not to say I won’t defend them or confront the customer, because I will, but what exactly do you expect?

You’re wearing a T-shirt five sizes too small along with your baby’s first swim trunks and flirting with losers for tips. For this reason, based on a calculated decision, you just made eight hundred dollars in a single night. I suppose the way this should work is, you should just get a lot of money, all on your own terms? Maybe we should just wire it to you, and you don’t even show up?

Guys are gross. They try and fight me sometimes. You’re not the only person who has to deal with it, and my sympathy lies not with you but the cleaning ladies.

I’m not defending the behavior of guys, but I don’t see how of all people in the world that Britney is going to rewire human nature and millions of years of evolution and cultural imprinting.

And here’s the thing that Britney and her ilk won’t tell you: All she has to do is say the word, and a big scary ex-con who works the door and carries a gun will immediately drag the guy and his friends out of there and possibly beat the shit out of them.

That’s a perk most people don’t have. If you sell tires and a customer is getting in your face, you can’t just summon a pro wrestler.

But looks fade. A lot of people get caught up in the bartending lifestyle. The last place I worked my co-worker said, “You know, when I started working here, I told myself this is the last bar I’ll ever work at. That turned out to be true, but it was twenty years ago.”

My heart sank a little.

The money is good, so people get complacent. They stop thinking about whatever they really wanted to do before they started bartending, in part because bartending isn’t the party people think it is, it’s a real job and it’s demanding. You’re tired afterwards. You have to sleep in. You have to check your schedule and deal with having someone cover your shift because you need a night off for your husband’s birthday. Did you forget to unplug the ice machine? Great, the place flooded, here’s an hour-long phone call with your manager about how you’re dropping the ball, and you’re convinced they’re going to replace you.

Your job security is non-existent. There are a thousand other people who want, and are capable of, doing your job, and they’re usually younger and more eager and less beaten down and hence their enthusiasm is much greater than yours and they’ll be telling far less customers to fuck off, at least in the honeymoon period, and you’re not in a union.

Then, just like that, they put you out to pasture. A fifty-year-old bartender? I hope you have a retirement account. But you don’t. And they never have a mortgage, never saved and put up a down payment. What happened to all that money?

In terms of the soul-sucking, every goddamn person is a scammer. Especially the younger generations who have been raised on crypto rug-pulls, by their youtuber heroes no less, on inflation and knowing they’ll never own a home and a president who normalized being a scumbag.

If they give you a credit card, it’s a dummy. You have to run it quickly before they chug their drinks and dip out.

“Hey, did you get a new haircut, you look great!” one guy said to me, then he slowly backed into the crowd trying to disappear, as if I’d been so grateful of the compliment I’d been temporarily stunned. I had to jump out from behind the bar and demand money.

That was the best he could think of.

Once a group of college-aged girls, snazzily dressed, ordered some drinks, which I brought them. There was a credit card sitting on the bar. It was a nondescript red credit card, but I had a feeling the person sitting there before them had forgotten it. It was busy so I didn’t know for sure.

“Put it on that,” one of them said.

“Okay, is it yours?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Okay, that’s funny,” I said.

She looked me right in the eye.

“I’m serious,” she said. This skank attending an elite private college thought I was going to commit a felony on behalf of her, I’m not sure why, but this behavior was extremely common.

One of the bars I worked at allowed bartenders to “auto-grat,” or charge automatic gratuity to checks. The situation arose because this bar had a fairly ghetto clientele, and the average person would not leave a tip, which made it very difficult for the place to retain competent bartenders.

Every third person would want to instigate an argument about the automatic tip. It was ironic, because the automatic tip wouldn’t have been necessary if it hadn’t been statistically probable that they weren’t going to tip in the first place.

I actually suspect much of the animosity came from the fact that these customers, looking around at a crowded bar and the number of transactions, could surmise that the bartenders were making quite a bit of money, which they didn’t think the bartenders deserved, because the bartenders were hardened vets who were impatient with all of the customers, for good reason.

Every night or two someone would leave a wallet or a purse. I would often, out of necessity, look through the wallet or purse so I could find out who it belonged to and return it to the appropriate person if they came and asked for it.

I would estimate over half of the purses contained an EBT, or food stamps, card. A drink at this place cost twelve dollars at minimum. A few times out of boredom I matched up the ID of the person with their check from the night they left their belongings.

“Ninety-five bucks on tequila, interesting,” I thought, stroking my chin.

I’m assuming that many readers are thinking, I shouldn’t have to tip, it’s bullshit.

I agree, but structurally the tip is paying for the operation of the entire establishment.

If you didn’t tip your bartenders, the type of person who works at the DMV would be your bartender and you would never get a drink, ever. They’d just sit there eating while you stared at them. You’re paying for someone to be good at their job, so you shouldn’t get the benefit of their skill without paying for it. It’s a byzantine system but you should be condemned if you try and skirt it, just like committing welfare fraud.

By the way, I’m talking about like two dollars.

Anyway, among the local crowd, word got around that you couldn’t charge someone an automatic tip if they paid cash, so they all started paying in cash and tipping nothing at all while being even ruder, beautiful.

As the problem arose, it was very slow, I was the only bartender on duty, and a certain couple, the only people there, were sitting at the bar not talking to each other and staring straight ahead expressionless.

They were wearing really stupid clothing with name brand banners running down the sleeves, which alerted me to them not being local. The guy looked like an MMA vape shop dweller, except bigger, and the chick an aspiring onlyfans model, just some janky weirdo couple who probably did weird things to each other every night.

They ordered a round of drinks. I asked if they wanted to start a tab or close out, which they responded they’d like to close out.

I ran their card, thirty bucks, with an eighteen percent tip.

They sat there not talking to each other, staring straight ahead. I wondered if they were on vacation from Buffalo and didn’t even consult Reddit to see what a terrible vacation destination Los Angeles is, like they thought they would just show up and party with Rihanna at some club.

“Where are you guys from?” I asked. Unintelligible murmur. Okay.

Then they ordered another round, so I ran the guy’s card again and charged him another automatic tip. These people were creepy. They clearly didn’t like me from the jump. I got the impression they didn’t like anyone. It gave me satisfaction to know that they wouldn’t be able to stiff me.

“Yo, you can’t tip yourself,” the guy spoke up. At least he was talking, finally, and I had seen this coming.

“It’s just the policy,” I said, not trying to appear sympathetic or want to engage in this particular conversation.

“That’s illegal, you can’t do that, that’s illegal,” the guy responded, harried.

“It’s not,” I said.

This had happened before. As if the establishment hadn’t checked on the legality before instituting the policy. Let alone it’s common practice. This was ludicrous. These people were clearly not from California. How would they know California law?

“I’m a lawyer,” the guy said.

This had also happened before. It’s an interesting phenomenon. People who are completely unbelievable as being lawyers for a number of reasons, such as that they’re twenty-two years old and dressed like Justin Bieber and clearly trash, often claim to be lawyers.

Actual real-life lawyers don’t ever even proclaim themselves to be lawyers. They ask you a bunch of questions until they have some red meat, and then they dismantle you, or they issue a very specific threat, confidently.

I wasn’t in the mood, so instead of saying something like, “What type of law are you currently practicing,” I just said, “No you’re not.”

Then they ordered another round of drinks, and I didn’t think twice about what to do.

I added the automatic tip again.

As I handed the guy the check, I could sense him starting to unravel, almost going full Incredible Hulk and tearing at the collar of his shirt.

“You can’t gra ti tu ity me! You can’t grat i tu ity me!” Not gratuity. Gratituity.

Luckily, my trusty door man, the security guard, was here for this very purpose, so I walked toward the entrance to summon him and he was… gone. Probably went to get something from the taco truck.

The guy started writhing in anger, screaming unintelligible things, maybe the Spice was kicking in. I went back behind the bar, because it was a natural barricade, and this guy was not only big, but clearly exhibiting that meth energy where people tip over cars.

This is when he tried to jump over the bar.

“Shit,” I thought.

I looked around for something to defend myself with and noticed only hundreds of glass bottles. I grabbed the well whiskey, the cheapest one, I’m a loyal employee after all, and held it over my shoulder by the neck like a baseball bat.

The guy was temporarily caught, kind of teetering between tipping over into the area behind the bar, which was extremely close quarters, and just falling back into his previous position behind the bar.

He fell back but tried again, and at this point his girlfriend began attempting the same thing the other side of the bar, maybe they were trying to box me in.

Without thinking I began hurling bottles at them, one after the other, bang bang bang, they crashed against the wall, a few of them hit with a thud, I was firing rapid artillery, even getting into the mid-shelf stuff, a bottle of Bombay Saphire, a nice heavy square bottle, bounced off the guy’s shoulder and I heard him groan, and I saw some blood coming out underneath his boldly-labeled Gucci shirt.

He was dazed, and as I drove his girlfriend off with the Hennessey I prepared myself to finish him, selecting the Jack to smash on his forehead.

The door guy walked in and dropped his burrito and promptly subdued the guy, easily, there was glass and booze and blood everywhere, I jumped over the bar and made sure the girl wasn’t going to pull any moves.

He gave me an 80s movie look like, “I leave for ten minutes and this is what happens?”

We got them out and locked the door, and had a drink.

I got home and couldn’t sleep and my girlfriend was pissed at the farmer’s market the next morning and accused me of being hungover.

This type of thing happens all of the time. There are fights and people yelling at you and everything else.

It’s also really fun sometimes.

It’s an interesting job, and for something not requiring a degree it’s an excellently well-paying job, but it’s not as glamorous as people make it out to be, you’re not just shooting the shit with people and pouring drinks.